After Superior Court Judge John Kralik’s second marriage ended in divorce in 2007 he spent his next New Year’s Day hiking a trail that led him to the top of Echo Mountain in the Angeles National Forest above Pasadena.
Kralik had planned to do that hike with his wife Grace before she broke up with him, leaving him in a state of shock and feeling terribly depressed. He asked her to go with him anyway, but when she declined, he decided to go alone, hoping it would help him get himself together and determine some direction for his future.
All day he seemed to be hearing an inner voice saying he was a loser and a loner, and that at 52 his life was over. One positive childhood memories that came to him, though, was how his grandfather once gave him a silver dollar and said that if he wrote him a thank you note for his gift, that he would give him an additional one.
This got him to thinking that maybe he needed to refocus, invest more time and energy in expressing gratitude for what he did have rather than just obsessing over the grief he felt for his losses. So he resolved to write a thank you note to a different person each day throughout 2008. The results were compiled in a book that became a bestseller, “365 Thank Yous, The Story of How a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life.”
Beginning with writing thanks for material things, he began to reflect on the many relationships that were priceless to him, everyone from old friends to current employees, and to realize how important, generous, and wonderful these people were, and how often he'd neglected to let them know.
Changing his focus and writing the notes truly changed his life. As a bonus, the book became a bestseller, with the paperback second edition entitled, “A Simple Act of Gratitude.”
This sounds like a great lesson for each of us for the New Year.
Showing posts with label gratitude. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gratitude. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Living From the Grateful Side of the Ledger
Thanksgiving Day somehow brings to mind one of one of my late uncles, Moses Nisly.
Mose, one of my mom's older brothers, lived at our house for an extended period of time as I was growing up. Never married, he spent most of his life in the homes of various of his siblings, and when he could no longer support himself, some of his ten living brothers and sisters took turns taking him in and taking care of him.
Uncle Mose was somewhat mentally challenged, the result of a high fever he experienced with a case of meningitis in his childhood, we were told. Actually, no one talked much about his childhood in our family, but there were numerous stories told about his eccentric traits as an adult.
For instance, Mose was incredibly tight with his money. He even resisted having his everyday work clothes washed regularly, fearing they would wear out sooner as a result. Then there was the story about how he lamented the cost of shipping his favorite rocking chair by rail from Iowa to Virginia when he came to live with us. He was outraged by the railroad company charging him what they did since, as he reasoned, “the train was making the trip here anyway!”
Another of Moses’ traits was absentmindedness. He was constantly forgetting where he had put things, then blaming others for having misplaced or taken them. All of this added to his generally unhappy and negative outlook on life, and to seeing himself as a victim.
In spite of his general forgetfulness, though, there was one category of memories Mose could recall in the greatest of detail. He could cite with ease example after example of people who had mistreated him throughout his life. When I heard Garrison Keillor once describing some people as having “Irish Alzheimer's,” a condition that results in people “forgetting everything but their grievances,” I immediately thought of my uncle.
But we can learn from people like that, realize how important it is to wrap lots of gratitude around us every day of our lives. Unlike Mose, we can practice living from the assets side of our memory ledger rather than the debit side.
To a great extent, our emotional and spiritual health depends on how we do our mental bookkeeping, whether we make generous deposits in our inner savings account, and whether we then live out of a sense of abundance rather than in a constant state of victimhood and scarcity.
Mose, one of my mom's older brothers, lived at our house for an extended period of time as I was growing up. Never married, he spent most of his life in the homes of various of his siblings, and when he could no longer support himself, some of his ten living brothers and sisters took turns taking him in and taking care of him.
Uncle Mose was somewhat mentally challenged, the result of a high fever he experienced with a case of meningitis in his childhood, we were told. Actually, no one talked much about his childhood in our family, but there were numerous stories told about his eccentric traits as an adult.
For instance, Mose was incredibly tight with his money. He even resisted having his everyday work clothes washed regularly, fearing they would wear out sooner as a result. Then there was the story about how he lamented the cost of shipping his favorite rocking chair by rail from Iowa to Virginia when he came to live with us. He was outraged by the railroad company charging him what they did since, as he reasoned, “the train was making the trip here anyway!”
Another of Moses’ traits was absentmindedness. He was constantly forgetting where he had put things, then blaming others for having misplaced or taken them. All of this added to his generally unhappy and negative outlook on life, and to seeing himself as a victim.
In spite of his general forgetfulness, though, there was one category of memories Mose could recall in the greatest of detail. He could cite with ease example after example of people who had mistreated him throughout his life. When I heard Garrison Keillor once describing some people as having “Irish Alzheimer's,” a condition that results in people “forgetting everything but their grievances,” I immediately thought of my uncle.
But we can learn from people like that, realize how important it is to wrap lots of gratitude around us every day of our lives. Unlike Mose, we can practice living from the assets side of our memory ledger rather than the debit side.
To a great extent, our emotional and spiritual health depends on how we do our mental bookkeeping, whether we make generous deposits in our inner savings account, and whether we then live out of a sense of abundance rather than in a constant state of victimhood and scarcity.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Grouchiness or Gratitude?
In an episode on Sesame Street, Oscar the Grouch sings this lament,
“Grouches of the world unite!
Stand up for your grouchly rights!
Don't let the sunshine spoil the rain,
Just stand up and complain (heheheh).
“Let this be the grouches' cause:
Point out everybody's flaws!
Something is wrong with everything
Except the way I sing!”
This is followed by the Grouch Choir ooing in the background, then Oscar, in a speaking voice, saying,
“You know what's right with this world? Nuttin! You know what gets me hot under the collar? You name it! And the next time some goody-two-shoes smiles and tells you to have a nice day, just remember:
“Don't let the sunshine spoil the rain,
Just stand up and complain!
Just stand up and complain!”
Sometimes I've heard similar sentiments (expressed in ways that are far less humorous!) by people like ourselves, folks in the top 5% of the most well-to-do people in the world, relatively rich by almost any measure.
This not to say we should just paste on a smile when we are truly suffering or in need, nor that an honest venting of a good lament isn’t in order at times. In fact, a third of the psalms in our Hebrew Bible are at least in part laments, but they are mostly by people who are living in third world conditions, always only a step away from extreme want. Yet even these laments tend to evolve into some kind of affirmation of how good God is in spite of everything, and of how important it is to wrap ourselves in as much gratitude as possible.
“Grouches of the world unite!
Stand up for your grouchly rights!
Don't let the sunshine spoil the rain,
Just stand up and complain (heheheh).
“Let this be the grouches' cause:
Point out everybody's flaws!
Something is wrong with everything
Except the way I sing!”
This is followed by the Grouch Choir ooing in the background, then Oscar, in a speaking voice, saying,
“You know what's right with this world? Nuttin! You know what gets me hot under the collar? You name it! And the next time some goody-two-shoes smiles and tells you to have a nice day, just remember:
“Don't let the sunshine spoil the rain,
Just stand up and complain!
Just stand up and complain!”
Sometimes I've heard similar sentiments (expressed in ways that are far less humorous!) by people like ourselves, folks in the top 5% of the most well-to-do people in the world, relatively rich by almost any measure.
This not to say we should just paste on a smile when we are truly suffering or in need, nor that an honest venting of a good lament isn’t in order at times. In fact, a third of the psalms in our Hebrew Bible are at least in part laments, but they are mostly by people who are living in third world conditions, always only a step away from extreme want. Yet even these laments tend to evolve into some kind of affirmation of how good God is in spite of everything, and of how important it is to wrap ourselves in as much gratitude as possible.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Re-gifting at Christmas
I once read a Dear Abby letter in which a reader lamented, “How do I get a person to stop re-gifting me? Often it's her used clothes, used decor and knickknacks that she no longer wants. This person can afford nice things, which is why she thinks I would like her old stuff. I find it insulting when I get it in the form of a gift. It is always wrapped beautifully and presented as though I should be so grateful. How do I get her to stop?” Secondhand Rose
Abby's response was, "Dear Rose: If I selected a gift for someone and she didn’t keep it--or exchanged it--I would give it one more try. If it happened again, from then on I would send a lovely card to mark the occasion, or a bouquet or plant. And if I was really ticked off, I would re-gift her gift back to her."
I'd like to offer a slightly different take on the concept of re-gifting in general, based on my belief that at some level everything we give, at Christmas or at any other times, is a form of recycled gift.
I first came to that realization years ago after I had finished leading the offertory prayer at my congregation. As folks were putting their gifts into the offering plates it struck me that some of those very funds would be given back to me as their pastor. In other words, I was at the receiving end of the church’s charity, a direct recipient of God’s money. And so whatever I gave or spent was a re-gifting.
My next thought was that we’re all pretty much the same in this respect, that we are each gift receivers more than we are earners or givers. What these church members had given to the church was also in some way first a gift to them. Which means that in a sense we've all been on God’s welfare since conception, and are, at best, working welfare recipients.
For a start, none of us has ever earned the priceless gift of life itself. And the privilege of being born to parents who loved us and took good care of us (at no charge), and of being born in a land of abundance instead of in some poverty-ridden country, were also things we could have never negotiated, bought or paid for. Besides, many of us received a free public school education, one paid for by others' involuntary gifts--in the form of taxes.
Later some of us got to enroll in institutions of learning we could have never been able to create (or afford to attend) without the generous gifts of hundreds of unnamed donors. Add to that our good health, our sound minds (most of the time), and whatever talents or gifts we've inherited--all helped us get whatever positions we’ve had, and are examples of amazing, unmerited grace.
When I was six, my parents were able to buy a farm with the help of a generous uncle who helped us with the financing. Here we grew and produced food for a living, but we could have never done that without the unearned blessings of God’s soil, sunshine and all of the other natural resources that makes a farm productive. In return for whatever we invested in money and labor for the harvests on our farm, we usually got sufficient payment to cover our costs, with some extra in the form of a gift known as profit. In the same way, whenever any of us buys or sells anything, this kind of gift-swapping takes place, grace for grace, blessing for blessing.
So that’s how I’ve come to believe that all of life is just one big gift exchange, a re-gifting.
Not that that’s a bad thing. It’s a good thing. I disagree with dour economists who say gift giving doesn’t make rational sense, in that whatever we choose to give seldom has the same value to the recipients as if they had been able to choose something for themselves, so things lose their value in the process. But that assumes that the benefit of being gift donors and gift recipients is based only on the market value of things, not on the serendipity that happens in the act of giving and receiving. I believe that in that exchange, value is added to value, and everyone is enriched. We are able to better realize our dependence on others, and our interdependence with all creation.
I’ll never forget one of our sons, at around 9 or so, deciding to take his entire piggy bank full of gift money he’d accumulated to give as a Bible School offering one summer for Heifer International. We didn’t realize how much he had gotten caught up in the enthusiasm to help raise as much as possible to send a heifer or some goats, rabbits, or other animals to some needy families abroad.
What he was doing wasn’t motivated by guilt. He saw it as an investment, a re-gifting for something he really believed in. He did it because it made him happy.
Once we realize how much we’ve been given, it no longer seems like a burden to freely pass on what are, after all, undeserved gifts.
I once read the story of a medieval landowner who came across a vagabond wandering across his estate.
“Get off my property,” he ordered.
“What right do you have to keep me off this part of God’s good earth?” the man asked.
“I own the land. It’s as simple as that,” the landowner replied.
“And how did you come to own it?” he asked.
“I inherited it from my father.”
“And how did he get it?”
“He inherited it from his father, a general in the king’s army. He fought for it, and was given the estate as a reward.”
“Then let’s you and I fight for it,” the man replied, “and whoever wins will own the land.”
Point of the story? If you look back far enough and hard enough, you realize that everything is first a gift. At Christmas, that’s a good thing to remember.
You and I just get to exchange. So let's pass good things around and around. Let's re-gift with abandonment.
Abby's response was, "Dear Rose: If I selected a gift for someone and she didn’t keep it--or exchanged it--I would give it one more try. If it happened again, from then on I would send a lovely card to mark the occasion, or a bouquet or plant. And if I was really ticked off, I would re-gift her gift back to her."
I'd like to offer a slightly different take on the concept of re-gifting in general, based on my belief that at some level everything we give, at Christmas or at any other times, is a form of recycled gift.
I first came to that realization years ago after I had finished leading the offertory prayer at my congregation. As folks were putting their gifts into the offering plates it struck me that some of those very funds would be given back to me as their pastor. In other words, I was at the receiving end of the church’s charity, a direct recipient of God’s money. And so whatever I gave or spent was a re-gifting.
My next thought was that we’re all pretty much the same in this respect, that we are each gift receivers more than we are earners or givers. What these church members had given to the church was also in some way first a gift to them. Which means that in a sense we've all been on God’s welfare since conception, and are, at best, working welfare recipients.
For a start, none of us has ever earned the priceless gift of life itself. And the privilege of being born to parents who loved us and took good care of us (at no charge), and of being born in a land of abundance instead of in some poverty-ridden country, were also things we could have never negotiated, bought or paid for. Besides, many of us received a free public school education, one paid for by others' involuntary gifts--in the form of taxes.
Later some of us got to enroll in institutions of learning we could have never been able to create (or afford to attend) without the generous gifts of hundreds of unnamed donors. Add to that our good health, our sound minds (most of the time), and whatever talents or gifts we've inherited--all helped us get whatever positions we’ve had, and are examples of amazing, unmerited grace.
When I was six, my parents were able to buy a farm with the help of a generous uncle who helped us with the financing. Here we grew and produced food for a living, but we could have never done that without the unearned blessings of God’s soil, sunshine and all of the other natural resources that makes a farm productive. In return for whatever we invested in money and labor for the harvests on our farm, we usually got sufficient payment to cover our costs, with some extra in the form of a gift known as profit. In the same way, whenever any of us buys or sells anything, this kind of gift-swapping takes place, grace for grace, blessing for blessing.
So that’s how I’ve come to believe that all of life is just one big gift exchange, a re-gifting.
Not that that’s a bad thing. It’s a good thing. I disagree with dour economists who say gift giving doesn’t make rational sense, in that whatever we choose to give seldom has the same value to the recipients as if they had been able to choose something for themselves, so things lose their value in the process. But that assumes that the benefit of being gift donors and gift recipients is based only on the market value of things, not on the serendipity that happens in the act of giving and receiving. I believe that in that exchange, value is added to value, and everyone is enriched. We are able to better realize our dependence on others, and our interdependence with all creation.
I’ll never forget one of our sons, at around 9 or so, deciding to take his entire piggy bank full of gift money he’d accumulated to give as a Bible School offering one summer for Heifer International. We didn’t realize how much he had gotten caught up in the enthusiasm to help raise as much as possible to send a heifer or some goats, rabbits, or other animals to some needy families abroad.
What he was doing wasn’t motivated by guilt. He saw it as an investment, a re-gifting for something he really believed in. He did it because it made him happy.
Once we realize how much we’ve been given, it no longer seems like a burden to freely pass on what are, after all, undeserved gifts.
I once read the story of a medieval landowner who came across a vagabond wandering across his estate.
“Get off my property,” he ordered.
“What right do you have to keep me off this part of God’s good earth?” the man asked.
“I own the land. It’s as simple as that,” the landowner replied.
“And how did you come to own it?” he asked.
“I inherited it from my father.”
“And how did he get it?”
“He inherited it from his father, a general in the king’s army. He fought for it, and was given the estate as a reward.”
“Then let’s you and I fight for it,” the man replied, “and whoever wins will own the land.”
Point of the story? If you look back far enough and hard enough, you realize that everything is first a gift. At Christmas, that’s a good thing to remember.
You and I just get to exchange. So let's pass good things around and around. Let's re-gift with abandonment.
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